If you haven't been paying attention to the news for a week or so, Wikileaks dropped a major bomb last week by releasing approximately 75,000 classified mission reports from the ongoing yet formally undeclared war in Afghanistan. The staff of Wikileaks has made it known that there is so much data there that anyone and everyone out there with programming skills should at least consider downloading the archived documents and writing software to analyze their contents to find patterns in the information. However, nothing ever happens in a vacuum and blowback is being felt across the Net, and I …
When installing the heatsink/fan assembly of an Intel CPU designed for the LGA 775 socket, do not twist the fastening pins of the cooling unit to seat them. Just use a flat-headed screwdriver to push them straight down. Twisting them is only done to remove the cooling unit!
A couple of months back I mentioned that HacDC had thrown its hat into the ring of the Hackerspaces In Space competition held by Workshop88. The past few months have been a whirlwind of activity designing and fabricating circuitry, running simulations, carving a number of chassis out of high density foam, installing hacked camera firmware and writing code for the microcontroller. Folks with much better engineering skills than I put together all of the interesting stuff - the microcontroller board, the transmitter, the camera controller, and stuff like that. Aside from helping wherever I could I spent most of my time …
If anybody's monitoring APRS, the Spaceblimp's callsign is W3HAC-11. We lost the probe a few hours ago and can't pick up its telemetry. If you pick anything up or you happen to find the probe itself in Virginia please get on 146.415 MHz (voice net) and tell us!
For whatever reason, this grasshopper decided to hitch a ride on the outside of the TARDIS for a couple of miles of my commute home on Wednesday night. He managed to hang on for quite a while at 25 miles per hour until deciding to carefully pick his way down the chassis to the roof, whereupon he took flight under his own power.